Folklife

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From the Heart and Hand

Hmong Qeej Music:

Tou Yang / Mai K. Moua, Missoula

It is important to encourage the young people to think
about their culture and get it back. Now is a good time to do that, to bring our
culture back to our young people here, and keep our culture alive.

- Tou Yang

For more than twenty years the Missoula area has been
home to a community of Hmong people from Laos. Among our allies they were the
most successful fighters against the Communists in the Vietnam War and many lost
their lives. When the United States withdrew from Laos and the when the
Communists took over, to avoid brutal reprisals, Hmong people by the thousands
crossed the Mekong River into Thai refugee camps. In their Laotian homeland, the
Hmong inhabited jungle and highlands, making a living as agriculturists, hunters
and traders. In partial recompense for their losses during the war, the
United States government helped some of the refugee Hmong to relocate in parts
of this country, including Montana.

The Missoula Hmong, who currently number over three hundred, have experienced many
of the trials of assimilation that many immigrants to this country have
faced. They have suffered discrimination for their "different" race and
ethnicity. Elderly refugees have had an especially difficult time
understanding modern American life. Finding a new way to make a living has not
come easy. Many older people suffer from depression as they see the traditional
culture being lost and the meaning of their lives changing. Younger Hmong people
do not always show respect for the culture and the elders. They experience the
same temptations from drugs, violence and gang life as so many other American
teens. Recently, studies have begun to show that when youth violence and
dysfunction become a problem in traditional cultures, an effective remedy is to
reinforce or reintroduce the teaching of traditional culture, including language
and the arts.

Tou Yang had both an instinctive and personal grasp of
this connection when he applied for an apprenticeship grant to teach Mai K. Moua
to play the Hmong qeej or kheng (pronounced kaing). The kheng, a six-pipe flute
or "mouth organ," plays an essential role in a Hmong funeral, the most important
ritual of a person's life. Without this instrument, and the songs and dances
that go with it, a Hmong person cannot have a spiritually effective ceremony
upon dying. The instrument is constructed from multiple bamboo
stalks laced together and fitted to one mouthpiece. When played, the kheng
produces a kind of ethereal drone from the multiple pipes being sounded at
once. The player must also do special dances to accompany the songs; the
solemn sounds of this music guide the deceased on their journey to the spirit
world. Hmong who follow the traditional ways believe that at death, the
soul survives the body. In fact, a human has at least three main souls. At
death, one of the souls guards the tomb of the deceased, another makes the long
journey to the spirit world and yet another is reincarnated in some future
generation of the same family. At a funeral, there must be two or four
kheng players and they must play, sing and drum continuously for two to four
days without stopping so that the person's soul is sure to travel to the right
place and they can come back to the family again.

Tou, who had studied this instrument as a young boy with a
teacher in Laos "listening, remembering word by word and song by song," realized
this complex knowledge could easily be lost in one generation and that teaching
another community member was a necessity. In two apprenticeships over a
two-year period, Tou instructed Mai Moua in kheng playing and singing the songs
for the funeral ritual. Now, instead of having to go to the Spokane
community to find a kheng player, Missoula's own Hmong community can draw upon
its traditional musicians.